flaring- up: rather, ἅπτω means to rivet, to attach, to pin on; however, it is also used by Heraclitus (as comes to light from fragment 26) to mean the striking of fire, that is, of light. To strike the light means: to make light, to let become bright, to lighten, to endow light. Now, when there is talk of the adornment here, which as fire itself is nothing made nor makeable; furthermore, when this adornment is not drawn from something other [170] that determines and rules it in some manner; if precisely the adornment is the inceptual unlocking, how then could this adornment inflame “according to measure”? Within the train of thought characteristic of a theological/metaphysical ‘cosmology,’ one may see evidence here for proof of God: however, in the saying of Heraclitus’s, there is no such thing. Moreover, it is utterly linguistically impossible to translate ἁπτόμενον μέτρα as “glimmering according to measure.” Anyone who does so retreats into the Old Testament in lieu of attempting to think the phrase in a Greek way. Moreover, such translations and interpretations do not make the least attempt to bring the word μέτρον into an essential relationship with πῦρ, i.e., κόσμος, i.e., ἁρμονία ἀφανής, i.e., φύσις.
τὸ μέτρον means “the measure,” and the word signifies also that “measurement” whereby and whereupon, for example, weights and lengths are measured. However, in the saying of Heraclitus’s, μέτρον certainly does not mean any old ruler by which things are measured. What is “measure”? Why is a ruler a μέτρον? Because with it length can be measured. What is measurable by measures and other measurement tools is itself the genuine measure: it is what is capable of being measured across and measured through—i.e., the di- mension. The fundamental meaning of μέτρον, and thus its very essence, is the expanse, the open, the sprawling and widening clearing. For the Greeks, μέτρον θαλάσσης does not mean “the measure” or the “scale” of the sea, but rather the expanse of the sea, the “open sea” itself. The inceptual adornment— φύσις as lightening jointure—ignites and lights the expanse in whose open that which appears first disperses into the conjoined expanse of its appearance and its distinctive look. However, because κόσμος (i.e., the inceptual adorning) is the emerging itself, this igniting and lightening of the expanses is in such a way that it constitutes the proper essence of κόσμος and bestows to it its essence. The perpetually emerging ignites for itself the emerging expanses that are essentially proper to it and that emerge within it owing to its character as emerging. However, because φύσις is essentially equal to the self-concealing (i.e., self- occluding), [171] this fire is precisely what occludes the expanses and thus conceals all dimensionality in which something can arise and presence as something appearing. Fire thus occludes, just as with the flash of lightning (and only with it) obscurity and darkness come to light and luminance for the first time in the suddenness of its extinguishing: namely, as the darkness that the lightning lightens. μέτρα are thus the measures in the originary sense of the emerging and self- occluding expanses into which a human perspective may first enter, and to which it may open itself in such a way as to be able to see the
128 The Inception of Occidental Thinking